On the Gradient of Thinking

[AshvinP]

I must be missing something - I fail to see how thinking, a local and finite activity, no matter how exalted, can directly invoke or be equivalent to a Oneness, or Intuitive Whole.
Can a thought convey unboundedness\Infinity\Freedom?
And if this is possible, to invoke a thought as Ideal Principle or Wholeness, what happens when one has to make dinner? Is the Wholeness forgotten or can one maintain Wholeness thinking along with daily chores thinking?

I know we have invoked the TM fallacy a few times, but it is again instructive here. We have to conceive of the normal thinking that we use in philosophy, science, to make sense of everyday experiences, etc. as the lowest expression of a unitary Conscious Activity (CA). It is the very first stage we reach after awakening to the reality of CA from instinctive animal life which is ignorant of that reality. We have used many analogies for this before. Most simply, it is like the frozen state of water, whereas higher modes of CA are akin to the fluid, gaseous, and 'plasma' states. Samadhi is not the plasma state, rather it resides at the threshold of the frozen and fluid states. There is practically no upper limit to how integrated this CA can become and the rest of human, Earthly, and Solar evolution will be an unfolding of the higher states.

The key is that, no matter what state we are speaking of, CA is aimed at making sense of its lawful experiential flow. When you cook dinner, I am sure you would agree there is a lawfulness to the various experiences involved, how the ingredients mix with each other, how the heat affects them, etc. Someone who had never learned to cook, by either observing/contemplating others cook, watching instructional videos, taking lessons, experimenting with ingredients, etc., would not be able to make the same amount of sense of this lawful experiential flow and therefore their cooking would suffer in range, results, and quality compared to someone who had learned more.

We should imagine the fluid and higher states are also exploring the unique lawfulness of the experiential flow at more integrated levels. What is the point of making sense of the experiential flow at ever-higher levels of integration? It's easier to ask, what is not the point of this? The point is not:

- To derive more sensual pleasure for ourselves
- To accumulate wealth and material goods
- To impress family, friends, or snag a mate
- To puff up knowledge and wield it over others academically or otherwise

We could probably add a couple more to that list. Practically everything else in individual and collective life can improve tremendously from this living knowledge. As a simple example, the cure for cancer is not hidden in a secret vault by evil pharmaceutical companies, but is veiled by each individual who is fully capable but nevertheless refuses to explore the depths of their soul life via the fluid state of CA. Such illnesses would disappear of their own accord as a natural result of that living exploration. We could go on endlessly with more examples. We aren't speaking of some one-time feeling of merging with the Whole but the very process by which the Whole differentiated through the 'big bang' of spiritual involution and how the resulting CA will evolve back to the Whole over comparably extensive Time-scales.

[Stranger]

In the spirit of ‘reaching across the aisle’ I’ve considered naming samadhi\pure consciousness a specific manner of thinking, even though it’s traditionally described as non-thinking.
We’ve all experienced thinking gross or crude thoughts (gross and crude not in content but mechanics, and we’ve experienced subtle abstract thoughts.
Perhaps one can think of samadhi as thinking of the most sublime and abstract kind, conveying unboundedness.
I think this creates more problems than it solves.
It’s cleaner and more traditional to describe samadhi, oneness, wholeness as a manner of being present, not as a way of thinking.

True, there is a "manner of being present", awareness directly aware of its own presence beyond thinking. This awareness is ever present in all beings, even in insects, but they don't know it. Likewise, the majority of humans don't know it, it is beyond their field of attention and cognition. Even though it's ever-present in their direct experience, it is veiled by the mist of the content of their minds and remains unrecognized. It is only when this direct presence of awareness becomes recognized by the subtle intuitive intellect, then its reality becomes known and obvious to a sentient being. In other words, oneness as a direct self-experience of Reality, as a fact, becomes noticed and known by/to thinking. This is just one of the many gates on the evolutionary path of conscious beings, but it's definitely not the end of the path, as some nondual teachings claim. And it happens due to, and as a part of, the evolutionary development of thinking from its most primitive forms up to the most developed and subtle. And Ashvin is right, this development is made possible by the lawful structures of thinking within which and along which gradients the evolution of consciousness flows.

As an analogy, it's like the sky that is always up there, but if we always only look at the ground, we never notice the sky and are not aware of its omnipresence. But once we turn our eyes up and directly see the sky, we suddenly realize "oh, there is a sky up there and it has always been there, I just never noticed it". Once this happened, our span of attention gradually becomes wider and all-encompassing so we can always see the sky while simultaneously seeing everything that happens on the ground.

[Federica]

The above gets to the heart of my beginning the thread on definitions and uses of specific terms . . .

***

Nothing is more dangerous than allowing yourself always to be carried by language, meaning that you say: “and here is how you express this thing, here is how you express that one” insofar as a stereotype or expression is present, insofar as people say: “there is only one way to express this”, we cast ourselves into the common stream of language and do not work with the original thoughts lying behind it.

When two people talk with one another they understand each other through language, but that language was, a relatively short time ago, something altogether different than it is today. When you understand something through language nowadays you essentially become a slave to that language. In an earlier time people learned a lot through the genius of language and they actually did not think very much for themselves, they allowed language to think for them. This only lasted for so long until the beginning of the time period that I described to you yesterday. Now, we will move forward only when we are able to emancipate ourselves from language in our thoughts and feelings.
Nowadays language essentially runs as though it were a machine, in whose midst we are standing in place of our human forces, and Ahriman is becoming increasingly more present in the developing life of our language. It is now Ahriman who speaks when people do. As a result, we must become more and more used to taking our understanding for something other than the words themselves. We must stand deeper in the midst of life in order to understand each other now, deeper than people did during an age when the things human beings exchanged with one another were still born on the wings of language.
That same exchange is no longer carried by those wings. Nowadays it is fundamentally possible for someone to be altogether empty of any sort of true knowledge, but because language - contemporary civilized language - has over time developed sentence structures, types of sentences, and even whole theories that lie entirely within language itself, that person would need only to slightly rearrange what is already there and will suddenly have created something seemingly new, when in actuality nothing more has been done than shuffle around the things that already existed.

GA 196 - unpublished in the rsarchive

[Stranger]

Lorenzo, I know this post by Ashvin was particularly appealing to you because of its one-paragraph format, however it would be great if you could also read the last one from Cleric, which was explicitly written to your attention and benefit. Please… it's still a reasonable length. Don't you think it could be worth the effort?

Thanks for pointing to that post - I missed it. Cleric's point does not materially change my question, or address my lack of credulity.
Apparently the answer is that the independent separate self does live forever in an exalted state.
Isn't this a simple upgrade like from Baggage Class to First Class? After countless lifetimes in this exalted state, what has been gained; isn't one still ensnared?
Isn't it wise to turn down such an offer?

As Rupert usually says, "the separate self is not an entity, it is conscious activity". As autonomous conscious activity, it is perfectly real and will continue existing after human life. Some people and teachings believe that, once they realize non-reality of individual self as a separate entity, they will dissolve into the non-dual "soup" after death losing all their cognitive abilities. Or, they would remain in the state of formless nothingness as some other teachings believe. BK suggests, by the way, that all beings will dissolve into the soup regardless of their level of development. However, there are good reasons to believe, and even directly know, that the evolution of consciousness does not stop after such realization, it just gets upgraded to a new level where the knowledge of oneness inseparable from the structured multiplicity of the universe is ever present, and consciousness, even within the individuated perspective, does not perceive itself as a separate being apart from the wholeness. There is no conditioning or enslavement in this state, because the non-conditional aspect of Reality is directly known and the ego is dissolved. In the Buddhist tradition it was called the state of "enlightened activity". You can still "turn down" this offer and go to "deep sleep" of the state of void nothingness, this is what many NDErs reported as an existential after-death "void" option. However, mind you, even in the Buddhist tradition this void state has always been considered a trap (as they call it, "arupaloka" - formless state), which has nothing to do with real enlightenment, and, as they say, it will eventually inevitably end and one will wake up again to the world of forms.

[AshvinP]

In the spirit of ‘reaching across the aisle’ I’ve considered naming samadhi\pure consciousness a specific manner of thinking, even though it’s traditionally described as non-thinking.
We’ve all experienced thinking gross or crude thoughts (gross and crude not in content but mechanics, and we’ve experienced subtle abstract thoughts.
Perhaps one can think of samadhi as thinking of the most sublime and abstract kind, conveying unboundedness.
I think this creates more problems than it solves.
It’s cleaner and more traditional to describe samadhi, oneness, wholeness as a manner of being present, not as a way of thinking.

True, there is a "manner of being present", awareness directly aware of its own presence beyond thinking. This awareness is ever present in all beings, even in insects, but they don't know it. Likewise, the majority of humans don't know it, it is beyond their field of attention and cognition. Even though it's ever-present in their direct experience, it is veiled by the mist of the content of their minds and remains unrecognized. It is only when this direct presence of awareness becomes recognized by the subtle intuitive intellect, then its reality becomes known and obvious to a sentient being. In other words, oneness as a direct self-experience of Reality, as a fact, becomes noticed and known by/to thinking. This is just one of the many gates on the evolutionary path of conscious beings, but it's definitely not the end of the path, as some nondual teachings claim. And it happens due to, and as a part of, the evolutionary development of thinking from its most primitive forms up to the most developed and subtle. And Ashvin is right, this development is made possible by the lawful structures of thinking within which and along which gradients the evolution of consciousness flows.

As an analogy, it's like the sky that is always up there, but if we always only look at the ground, we never notice the sky and are not aware of its omnipresence. But once we turn our eyes up and directly see the sky, we suddenly realize "oh, there is a sky up there and it has always been there, I just never noticed it". Once this happened, our span of attention gradually becomes wider and all-encompassing so we can always see the sky while simultaneously seeing everything that happens on the ground.

Eugene,

What is your perspective on the link between the higher CA states and our ability to address various problems that plague humanity, such as seemingly intractable medical issues briefly mentioned above? Have you also discerned that civilization will only be able to address these medical issues through the knowledge of higher CA states, since the latter elucidates the true soul-spiritual relationships that cause the former? Here is a passage from an essay for more context on the reasoning:

Imaginative activity is when we increase the sampling frequency such that we get a more faithful representation of the intuitive flow of experience. It samples not only sensory experience, but also the transformations of psychic and spiritual experience. Practically that means we resist forming conclusive judgments, models, and theories as ‘explanations’ of experiential facts and continue asking open-ended questions; we continue tracing the relations further and further into broader constellations of meaning that are not independent of, but integrally related to, our own activity. We pay more attention to not only the final products of our activity – our perceptions/thoughts - but the inner gestures of that activity. We then find these inner soul gestures are shared in common with many other beings in our environment. Then we also discern how our normal sensory-conceptual experience is but a more aliased form of the imaginative state.

What is aliased from that experience, however, is not simply more perceptual contents, but the entire depth of conceptual, emotional, and willful states of being. Our normal life of feelings, impulses, and ideas is reflected only in so far as those relate to sensory events, perhaps a little more if we have developed artistic or mathematical skills. The rest of that activity is left behind, so to speak, in the higher spaces of potential. Yet what is missing tells a story about sensory life completely unsuspected by normal conceptual thinking. For example, it is hardly suspected how the warring currents of the soul life contribute to the causes of many deadly diseases including cancer, by the same principle as it impresses into the saccadic eye movements we discussed before. It is only through the insight gleaned from imaginative and higher retracing that modern medicine will be able to usefully address everything from cancer to the nervous diseases that increasingly plague developed societies.

[Stranger]

Eugene,

What is your perspective on the link between the higher CA states and our ability to address various problems that plague humanity, such as intractable medical issues briefly mentioned above? Have you also discerned that civilization will only be able to address these medical issues through the knowledge of higher CA states, since the latter elucidates the true soul-spiritual relationships that cause the former? Here is a passage from an essay for more context on the reasoning:

Imaginative activity is when we increase the sampling frequency such that we get a more faithful representation of the intuitive flow of experience. It samples not only sensory experience, but also the transformations of psychic and spiritual experience. Practically that means we resist forming conclusive judgments, models, and theories as ‘explanations’ of experiential facts and continue asking open-ended questions; we continue tracing the relations further and further into broader constellations of meaning that are not independent of, but integrally related to, our own activity. We pay more attention to not only the final products of our activity – our perceptions/thoughts - but the inner gestures of that activity. We then find these inner soul gestures are shared in common with many other beings in our environment. Then we also discern how our normal sensory-conceptual experience is but a more aliased form of the imaginative state.

What is aliased from that experience, however, is not simply more perceptual contents, but the entire depth of conceptual, emotional, and willful states of being. Our normal life of feelings, impulses, and ideas is reflected only in so far as those relate to sensory events, perhaps a little more if we have developed artistic or mathematical skills. The rest of that activity is left behind, so to speak, in the higher spaces of potential. Yet what is missing tells a story about sensory life completely unsuspected by normal conceptual thinking. For example, it is hardly suspected how the warring currents of the soul life contribute to the causes of many deadly diseases including cancer, by the same principle as it impresses into the saccadic eye movements we discussed before. It is only through the insight gleaned from imaginative and higher retracing that modern medicine will be able to usefully address everything from cancer to the nervous diseases that increasingly plague developed societies.

Accidentally, I was just reading the above paragraphs while reading your essay. Wery insightful. Gabor Mate is also emphasizing the psychological and spiritual origins of physical illnesses, I think the awareness of this connection is now growing. I agree that reaching to higher CA state will open new ways for medical science, and for all kinds of sciences in general.

[lorenzop]

I must be missing something - I fail to see how thinking, a local and finite activity, no matter how exalted, can directly invoke or be equivalent to a Oneness, or Intuitive Whole.
Can a thought convey unboundedness\Infinity\Freedom?
And if this is possible, to invoke a thought as Ideal Principle or Wholeness, what happens when one has to make dinner? Is the Wholeness forgotten or can one maintain Wholeness thinking along with daily chores thinking?

I know we have invoked the TM fallacy a few times, but it is again instructive here. We have to conceive of the normal thinking that we use in philosophy, science, to make sense of everyday experiences, etc. as the lowest expression of a unitary Conscious Activity (CA). It is the very first stage we reach after awakening to the reality of CA from instinctive animal life which is ignorant of that reality. We have used many analogies for this before. Most simply, it is like the frozen state of water, whereas higher modes of CA are akin to the fluid, gaseous, and 'plasma' states. Samadhi is not the plasma state, rather it resides at the threshold of the frozen and fluid states. There is practically no upper limit to how integrated this CA can become and the rest of human, Earthly, and Solar evolution will be an unfolding of the higher states.

The key is that, no matter what state we are speaking of, CA is aimed at making sense of its lawful experiential flow. When you cook dinner, I am sure you would agree there is a lawfulness to the various experiences involved, how the ingredients mix with each other, how the heat affects them, etc. Someone who had never learned to cook, by either observing/contemplating others cook, watching instructional videos, taking lessons, experimenting with ingredients, etc., would not be able to make the same amount of sense of this lawful experiential flow and therefore their cooking would suffer in range, results, and quality compared to someone who had learned more.

We should imagine the fluid and higher states are also exploring the unique lawfulness of the experiential flow at more integrated levels. What is the point of making sense of the experiential flow at ever-higher levels of integration? It's easier to ask, what is not the point of this? The point is not:

- To derive more sensual pleasure for ourselves
- To accumulate wealth and material goods
- To impress family, friends, or snag a mate
- To puff up knowledge and wield it over others academically or otherwise

We could probably add a couple more to that list. Practically everything else in individual and collective life can improve tremendously from this living knowledge. As a simple example, the cure for cancer is not hidden in a secret vault by evil pharmaceutical companies, but is veiled by each individual who is fully capable but nevertheless refuses to explore the depths of their soul life via the fluid state of CA. Such illnesses would disappear of their own accord as a natural result of that living exploration. We could go on endlessly with more examples. We aren't speaking of some one-time feeling of merging with the Whole but the very process by which the Whole differentiated through the 'big bang' of spiritual involution and how the resulting CA will evolve back to the Whole over comparably extensive Time-scales.

Not denying anything you've written above - however, I am not referring to conscious activity. I am referring to what could be called 'states of consciousness'. The field of psychology has recognized 3 general states of consciousness, sleeping, dreaming and waking. The Upanishads recognize several additional states of consciousness, but that's another topic.
For example, waking state (WS) . . . WS is not the result of conscious activity, does not require any understanding, does not need to be invoked. We don't need to constantly or frequently affirm or check it ( don't need to 'I am aware, I am aware, I am aware'. . . ) We don't need to learn how to be awake, nor follow any laws or conventions to be awake.
WS is not the result of conscious activity, WS is a manner of being aware and present that allows certain modes of conscious activity to take place.
Dreaming is not the result of conscious activity, dreaming is a manner of being aware and present that allows certain modes of conscious activity to take place.
Sleep is not the result of conscious activity, sleep is a manner of being aware and present that allows certain modes of conscious activity to take place.

[Stranger]

Atman that is hidden within all beings is not evident; it is only perceived through the subtle and acute intellect.
Katha Upanishad 1.3.12

[lorenzop]

in Sanskrit the word for intellect (buddhi) is used differently than how we use the word in the West, buddhi is not a conscious activity.
Atman: It's who we are, not who we think we are.

[Stranger]

in Sanskrit the word for intellect (buddhi) is used differently than how we use the word in the West, buddhi is not a conscious activity.
Atman: It's who we are, not who we think we are.

Right, this is the state of samadhi, which is not active but steady, but it is still a state of the intellect. Atman does not change, it is the state of the buddhi-intellect that changes when moksha happens. However, while the highest buddhi remains in samadhi, the other faculties of the intellect can continue to be active. This is called sahaja samadhi. Ramana always remained in samadhi, however, he was quite active in life and talked a lot.

Even though the man sees the world after he has been in the samAdhi state, the world will be taken only at its worth, that is to say it is the phenomenon of the One Reality. The True Being can be realised only in samAdhi; what was then is also now. Otherwise it cannot be Reality or Ever-present Being. What was in samAdhi is here and now too. Hold it and it is your natural condition of Being. Samadhi practice must lead to it. Otherwise how can nirvikalpa samAdhi be of any use in which a man remains as a log of wood? He must necessarily rise up from it sometime or other and face the world. But in sahaja samAdhi he remains unaffected by the world. So many pictures pass over the cinema screen: fire burns away everything; water drenches all; but the screen remains unaffected. The scenes are only phenomena which pass away leaving the screen as it was. Similarly the world phenomena simply pass on before the jnAnI, leaving him unaffected.

Even if one is immersed in nirvikalpa samAdhi for years together, when he emerges from it he will find himself in the environment which he is bound to have. That is the reason for the Shankaracharya emphasising sahaja samAdhi in preference to nirvikalpa samAdhi in his excellent work vivekachUDAmaNi. One should be in spontaneous samAdhi - that is, in one's pristine state - in the midst of every environment.

Ramana Maharshi